Isiah Thomas Is The End Of College Basketball

Once he's done turning the CBA into a legitimate minor league, the wildly lucrative future of college hoops will be in his hands

The smile was always the tricky thing, all bright ambiguity in which trust fought hard against reptilian calculation. It came from a heart with dark corners, a soul thick with clouds and fog. Fathoms deep, it brightened a room without warming it. Isiah Thomas always had a smile of cold fire, a smile that rarely made it all the way to his eyes.

"Nice to see you again," he says, smiling that sourceless, curious smile. "What you been up to these days?"

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He works in an office now, just outside downtown Detroit, in an area for which some developer once had great hopes. The cobblestone sidewalks are still charming, and there is a renovated art deco movie house up the block, but plywood is beginning to blossom on all the corners of the little street. It is an unlikely place for a revolution, even a theoretical one, even a speculative one. It is here that Isiah Thomas, the sole owner of the Continental Basketball Association, is developing the ability to change the world in which he was formed and within which he prospered.

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Isiah comes out of his office in a stylish suit, and there is the smile again, charged by something fierce and implacable.

"Playing is the ultimate," he says. "There's nothing like playing on the court, you know, shooting the ball, competing one-on-one, because at the end of the day, there's a scorecard, and the people judge you by that. So there's nothing like that raw competition. Now, business is competitive, and there are a lot of different factors to it, but there's nothing like competing out on the court."

Nevertheless, there is still a sense of constant movement about him. Nobody ever hit retirement running the way he did. "I haven't stopped running since they were chasing me on the west side of Chicago," he says, and the smile comes back, bright and easy, its deliberate charm sharp and clear and cutting, using the casual brutality of his childhood to the same rhetorical effect to which John McCain uses his days as a POW, as the final trump card in any conversation.

He came from Congress Street on Chicago's west side, the youngest of nine children raised by Mary Thomas, who was so formidable a woman that Disney made a movie about how she raised her children. Early on, he saw life as an endless competition, a wilderness of scoreboards, and he threw himself into it. The smile was the way he masked how trackless were his travels there, how lost he could become.

He had that smile all during the thirteen years in which he carved out a small man's great career in the NBA, a career that, despite its pair of championships with the Detroit Pistons in 1988 and 1989, seemed oddly eclipsed at its beginning by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, and at its end by the towering figure of Michael Jordan.

Thomas was a fierce and angry competitor. There was an element of danger to the way he played that was far beyond the carefully calculated woofing on which the NBA's corporate persona thrives. He always looked as though he were playing for blood stakes. That was what burned behind the smile--a champion's contentment grappling with a predator's joy.

At the end of his career, Thomas was admired but not liked, respected but not loved. Whatever was the case, he never stopped moving. In 1994, three days after his retirement, Thomas moved to Toronto and took the job of running the expansion Raptors. He also had a 9 percent ownership stake in the club. His was the most recognizable face that the franchise had in its early years.

But in 1997, after failing in an attempt to buy the team, Thomas left the Raptors, citing differences with the new majority owner, Allan Slaight. It was during his time there, however, that the Raptors built the foundation for their dynamic young team. "If you look at my body of work there," he says, "I did a pretty good job.

"I think why I was successful putting together that Toronto franchise was because I could put together the business side and the sports side. You understand how important that bus ride is to the game. It gives you a huge advantage when you can combine that with the business side of it, because the person you're competing with doesn't understand. I mean, he understands business, but he can never understand the emotions you feel when you're standing at the free-throw line with five seconds to go."

His ambition--that great blazing thing that gives his smile its dangerous charge--still drives him. Last August, Isiah Thomas paid $10 million to buy the Continental Basketball Association. Not a franchise, mind you, but the whole sprawling, ancient league, all nine franchises together--lock, stock, and Sioux Falls Skyforce, it's his now. And in that purchase, he may have found the challenge to meet the fire of his ambition.

In his grand design to remake the CBA into an authentic minor league patterned after baseball's apprenticeship model, Thomas has an opportunity to do more than raise the profile of a league that has seemed stuck forever in the Iowa permafrost. He has it in him to be the man who brings down college basketball, that revolting feast of fat things in which everyone gets rich except the unpaid adolescents who do the real work and who have become increasingly restive at being played for such conspicuous suckers by coaches, alumni, and the various hired larynxes of the television networks. It is an entertainment property standing on very thin sand, and Isiah Thomas knows it.

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"We've had discussions with the NCAA about trying to find a way to work together," he says. "Because, clearly, if you were looking at it from a basketball standpoint and a business standpoint and you want to be a cutthroat about it, you could undercut it, yeah. So, instead of being cutthroat, I believe my business practice is win-win. There's a way everyone can win out of this.

"But all of my partners are saying, 'Let's just offer the kids a couple of hundred thousand, and they can come into our league.' Clearly, we have the power and the possibility to do that, if we so choose."

And then the smile comes again, and if I were any of the suits grown portly on the sweat of uncompensated teenagers, I would look at that smile and I would see all the way back to Congress Street on the west side of Chicago, and I would see the hunger and the ambition, bright as edged steel, and I would wonder about my future.

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LAST OCTOBER, CBS paid $6.2 billion for rights to televise college basketball beginning in 2003. This was a staggering, loathsome amount of money, even by the standards for loathsome amounts of money that have been established in the marriage of sports and television.

The deal gave many people pause. (Everyone, that is, except for veteran CBS commentator Billy Packer, who long ago came to the conclusion that every college basketball player really works for him.) For years, the romantics among us argued that players were sufficiently compensated by the scholarships they were granted in order to represent the various institutions. This was a charming notion, and it obtained as long as college basketball remained a pastime, like the glee club or the key society. It became a cruel joke only when college basketball became a job.

Today, the average player on a high-profile college team works a sixty-hour week at a job that requires travel. This job enriches everyone but the player himself, who is forbidden by regulatory statute from profiting from his own work. Gradually, through the years, it has dawned on the players that the system's inequities increasingly outweigh its rewards, and they have become fidgety, rebelling against it in dozens of tiny ways, many of them unethical in themselves. Jefferson once wrote that people will suffer as long as evils are sufferable, but then he went on about long trains of abuses and usurpations, and the next thing that George III knew, he was short one continent on his empire.

(And, yes, education is important, and a college degree remains something everyone should have on which to fall back. It is also irrelevant to how one builds a basketball career. Given the proper motivation, a player can pick up his degree in his own good time. It took Elvin Hayes almost twenty years, but he did it. This past December, Antawn Jamison took a day off from the Golden State Warriors in order to graduate from North Carolina.)

There are signs of revolution everywhere. Several notable fundamentalists have talked openly about "stipends," which, no matter how much they or the NCAA would like to believe otherwise, are really a system of pay-for-play. It is surely impossible to argue that paying a player $200 per month is moral while paying him $1,000 per month is not. Engage a system of stipends and the war is over.

Elsewhere, the word is getting around among the employees that their position vis-Ã -vis the profits of their labors has become absurd. Every spring, there is much mooing in the land about young college players leaving early for the NBA, or even younger high schoolers skipping college altogether. However, given the situation, and given their available options, it is hard not to see these early entries as anything more than fundamentally revolutionary acts.

"I think those are the acts of revolt," says Isiah Thomas. "That's the act of crying out and saying, 'Hey, something's wrong here.' But that's the growth of the sport, and I just think that, with growth, there has to be change, and I believe, with the conversations we've had with the NCAA, that they understand that.

"Personally, and this is just my personal belief, I don't think that people should put all their eggs in one basket and play basketball and make money and not be educated. I think the two must go hand in hand. Now, my business partners, they think differently than I do. It's a good thing I'm out front."

Most significant, the NBA itself has reacted with conspicuous passivity to the several players who've come into the league straight from their senior proms, despite the consensus among NBA observers that the phenomenon has hurt the quality of play around the league. In part, this is because there's no legal way for the league to do much about it. But it also must be said that, contrary to popular belief, the high schoolers who've entered the NBA without playing in college historically have done rather well. Moses Malone will soon be in the Hall of Fame, and Darryl Dawkins might have ended up there as well if he hadn't been one of the NBA's transcendent loons, which would've been the case even if Dawkins had done four years at Cal Tech. More recently, Kevin Garnett has become one of the two or three best players in the league, and Kobe Bryant is a perennial All-Star. Al Harrington and Tracy McGrady are solid contributors in Indiana and Toronto, respectively.

"I think they're protecting college too much," says Rick Pitino, who coached for eight seasons at Kentucky before taking over the Celtics. "I think the professionals are worried about the college game. I don't know why. They're not worried about it in hockey or in baseball.

"The moral obligation is to the person. We seem to make the obligation to the TV viewer who loves March Madness or to the school. The obligation is to the person."

The current structure of college basketball cannot survive much longer. Its moral flaws are too obvious, too brightly gilded, to be ignored. The player's options are indefensible, being limited to: (a) play for free; (b) play for whatever you can grab under the table, and feel cheap and sleazy; or (c) try to make the NBA.

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"I never thought every basketball player should go to college any more than every musician should go to Juilliard," says one NBA scouting director.

Give them the choice, and there goes that $6 billion payday. If you ever wonder why Kobe Bryant gave so many people the vapors a few years back, it was because he dared take control of his own abilities. He declined to work cheap on behalf of Bob Knight, or Dick Vitale, or Billy Packer, or CBS, or the NCAA, or various shoe companies, or everyone who enters an office pool every March. He declined the chance to take up residence in a whorehouse with an unusually high number of piano players.

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"I think that if I was a college basketball fan or a college coach, which I was, I would rather have it that a player could serve an apprenticeship in someplace like the CBA," explains Pitino. "If they can make a good living, what's wrong with that?"

In the words of one of its consummate devotees in Boston, you can see college ball in the crosshairs--a fat, sleek, and increasingly slow-moving target. Isiah Thomas can bring it down. Anyone can. The only question is whether anyone wants to.

ADRIAN GRIFFIN IS drooping with exhaustion. Pitino has just run Griffin and the rest of the Celtics through a hard practice on a soft, foggy afternoon at the beginning of winter. Last season, Griffin was the Most Valuable Player for the Connecticut Pride, which won the 1999 CBA championship. Two seasons out of Seton Hall, Griffin averaged nineteen points and eight rebounds for the Pride, all of which got him an opportunity--and only that--to play in the Celtics' summer league. His rebounding and defense caught Pitino's eye, and Griffin became one of the NBA season's early surprises. He is a victory for the CBA, and one wonders how good he might've been had he started his apprenticeship there at eighteen instead of at twenty-two.

"I think everybody in [the CBA] is looking for the chance I got," Griffin says. "But the reality is that not everybody's going to get that chance. So, I mean, it's not bad. You're playing in the States, the game you love, for money. It's not great money, but still, it's money."

The CBA is nothing if not resilient. It is the oldest professional basketball league in the world. It survived the game's raffish beginnings relatively intact. It nearly folded in the 1980s. In recent years, however, the CBA has begun to act on the notion that it is a legitimate option for players who do not have the inclination to hone their skills in college. The percentage of former CBA players in the NBA has risen to 20 percent. When Isiah Thomas bought the league, then, the CBA already had begun to redefine itself, not as a second-rate league but rather as a farm system, just as Thomas had in mind.

"When you look at baseball, it has over two hundred teams playing in its minor league systems," he says. "Minor league hockey has over a hundred teams playing in its systems. Minor league basketball, which is the number-one sport in America right now, currently has nine teams."

It is clear that Thomas's goal is the construction of a coherent farm system. There would be a draft, most likely a territorial one, so that players would play close to home. There would be chains not unlike those in baseball and hockey. Everyone--players, coaches, referees--would move upward through the chain, toward the NBA. Thomas has designs on purchasing the United States Basketball League and the International Basketball Association, two smaller minor leagues, for the purpose of folding their teams into an expanded CBA.

"Let's be safe and let's say we'll have three CBA teams in Michigan," Thomas explains. "You can have those three teams in what we'll call CBA-1, and you can possibly have a couple of CBA-2 teams, and three or four CBA-3 teams, and so on.

"Will there ever be one-to-one team affiliations like there are in baseball? I don't know, because that's a conversation that has to occur between the Players Association and the NBA. If they agree, we'll be glad to give them twenty-nine teams out of our system that they can use as farm teams."

The day wanes and the Christmas lights come on outside, shining red off the plywood that mottles what once was some developer's golden dream. He is moving through the quiet office again. "It's called understanding your business," he says. "And we understand our business." Then the smile again, and there is a new dimension behind it this time, all calculation and design.

Years ago, when he first came into the NBA from under Knight at Indiana, Thomas was an unbanked flame. He would take over entire games, and Detroit would not win some of them, and he never seemed to understand why. The smile would get bright and cold then. There was always a distance to it, as though he was puzzling out the world he was so driven to entertain. In his time, Thomas existed outside of the categories, always respected but never loved, and he thrived there, learning.

He has a goal now, just the way he had one in those days when he was all the Pistons had, and the clock was winding down, and the side of the floor was clearing, and he was alone. He could hear the sounds of his own life all the way back down the distance he'd climbed, all the way back down to Congress Street. And he would move then, and the game would move with him and only with him, win or lose.